Dominant Social Theme: Silvio Gesell and Major Douglas had it right. Pure fiat, paper and electronic, is the wave of the future. Just make sure you keep track of every transaction.

Free-Market Analysis: It has been a puzzle to us why the United Nations would want to encourage alternative currencies and why there has been a surge of feedback comment on alternative websites about "usury" and the evils of interest.

One after the other, websites and blogs have suddenly sprung up like mushrooms dutifully prating the idea that people should not be allowed to use interest, that gold and silver were entirely controlled by the Rothschilds (they are not) and that monopoly private banking was the duty of the government (God help us) not private "banksters."

It seems to us, perhaps, to have the signature of a power elite promotion. As we can see in the above job description, the US government via Lockheed Martin is anticipating the popularity of such systems as well – both Bitcoin and something called Secondlife.

Why the heck would the military-industrial complex search out specialists in such? Understanding the way these currencies work better now, we think we've figured it out.

Traceability! Almost all the modern schemes demand ledgers where transactions are recorded. It surely would be easy enough for "authorities" to gain access to these records, if they wished to.

You don't have to be doing something illegal to want anonymity. With these systems you surely don't seem to get it. Their very operation demands intensive record keeping, sometimes of every transaction.

This is a forensic financial investigator's dream situation. It is possible, perhaps, to reconstruct just about any transaction. It's not like paper fiat where greenbacks are anonymous and gold and silver are traded (often) without identifying signatures.

We went looking for comments regarding Bitcoin and traceability and found this study by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan, researchers with the Clique Research Cluster at University College Dublin:

Bitcoin is not Anonymous

Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. It may be possible to conduct transactions is such a way so as to obscure your identity, but, in many cases, users and their transactions can be identified. We have performed an analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system and published our results in a preprint on arXiv.

Anonymity is not a prominent design goal of Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin is often referred to as being anonymous. We have performed a passive analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system using publicly available data and tools from network analysis. The results show that the actions of many users are far from anonymous. We note that several centralized services, e.g. exchanges, mixers and wallet services, have access to even more information should they wish to piece together users' activity. We also point out that an active analysis, using say marked Bitcoins and collaborating users, could reveal even more details.

We've always been a bit suspicious of Bitcoin because when Bitcoin first came out we got lots of unsolicited emails and editorials about what a breakthrough it was.

The feedback and the publicity were reminiscent of the types of promotion we are exposed to when the elites are promoting a particular perspective. For a while, for instance, we were deluged by "free" editorials proclaiming the "evil" of Islam. This is because the power elite that wants to create world government also wants to create a religious war between Islam and the West. Out of chaos, order.

As far as alternative credit systems go, these schemes (Major Douglas' mutual credit comes to mind) must be highly traceable, as they apparently demand a centralized authority keeping track of buying and selling as a matter of course.

When we researched these systems we were astonished to find that the United Nations was a big proponent of them and that one of the top promoters of such systems was Margrit Kennedy − who used to work for UNESCO. You can see some of our articles here:

Another signature of these systems – often called LETS and UNILETS – is the almost hysterical antipathy of proponents to the (anonymous) use of gold and silver. Transactions in gold especially are frowned upon because gold is "controlled" by banksters.

On the face of it, this is untrue. Wikipedia tells us that 50 percent of the gold in the world these days is produced for jewelry and 10 percent for industry. Even assuming nefarious "banksters" are cornering the rest of the market (a fairly absurd assumption) that still leaves 60 percent of gold production circulating in a fairly free-flowing and open environment as jewelry. Anybody can buy it, and hundreds of millions, if not billions, do.

Why would proponents of alternative monetary schemes trade in such untruths? Usually because there is a larger agenda at work. Now we would add, as we have before, that within the context of competing currencies, we are theoretically supportive of mutual and social credit, LETS systems, etc.

But it has also bothered us that such systems were championed in Britain by power elite groups such as the Fabians. And the vituperation and falsehoods directed at the blossoming Austrian economic movement by proponents of such systems has been astonishing.

We tried to track down the founder of Bitcoin, but Satoshi Nakamoto seems to be anonymous (unlike Bitcoin).

Satoshi Nakamoto is the founder of Bitcoin and initial creator of the Original Bitcoin client. He has said in a P2P foundation profile that he is from Japan. Beyond that, not much else is known about him and his identity. He has been working on the Bitcoin project since 2007.

His involvement in the Bitcoin project had tapered and by late 2010 it has ended. The most recent messages reportedly indicate that Satoshi is "gone for good."

His identity and nationality are unknown. The few bits of information available about him point to Japan, he never wrote a single line of Japanese, the Bitcoin client has no Japanese version and there is no Japanese page on bitcoin.org.

He is entirely unknown outside of Bitcoin as far as anyone can tell, and his PGP key was created just months prior to the date of the genesis block. He seems to be very familiar with the cryptography mailing list, but there are no non-Bitcoin posts from him on it. He has used an email address from an anonymous mail hosting service (vistomail) as well as one from a free webmail account (gmx.com) and sends mail when connected via Tor. Some have speculated that his entire identity was created in advance in order to protect himself or the network. Perhaps he chose the name Satoshi because it can mean "wisdom" or "reason."

After Thoughts

There are many interesting facets to alternative currencies, but anonymity is not one, perhaps. Is it possible that the powers-that-be are covertly supporting such currencies as an alternative to the anonymity of money metals and "cash"?

You don’t have to play by the rules of the corrupt politicians, manipulative media, and brainwashed peers.

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